Hello!

I used to run Norton Internet Security (only the AV and Firewall turned on).

It's good at protection, but almost choked my PC. It was taking ages to load, Internet related programs were not running properly (even with proper settings) and basically It was making using the PC a chore.

I uninstalled it and a few other programs, and then installed Avast! Antivirus.

Several days later, I had big issues with a corrupt operating system. All files became orphaned, and with a few days stress (Mrs. Worf wasn't happy with the prospect of losing all her stuff) and a hard drive later I was able to save the files and start over.

This was a few months back now, and I finally have the PC back to how it kinda used to be.

I installed AVG, but now it's really annoying me - the e-mail scanner is just too "bulky", if you know what I mean.

The reason I went for AVG was because I didn't want the #### of Norton again, and was scared to install Avast! after what happened within a week of installing it before (probably just me being silly).

I have no problem spending money on a good AV, but is there anyone that can advise me on which one to go for?

I now have a spare 3.5 SATA HDD, I would like to use it to back-up to. I don't have space inside my case for another drive - and was looking at going for an external enclosure, are these okay? Can you get one that's more than just an enclosure?

Is there a way to completely backup a HDD? If so, does it require a HDD the exact same size? The main HDD is around 200GB, and the backup is 80GB...

Sorry for the ramble! I trust you guys, so just wanted a good opinion.

You can go with Comodo Antivirus... It's free (for life) and works really well...  Updates are frequent and it catches everything...  We're in the process of implanting at school.  We did several tests and it beats Norton and McAfee hands down..

As for back-up, why don't you do a ghost (image) of your drive.  The program I use is Acronis True Image but there are many others that'll do the job...  If you have Nero, you can use its ImageDrive...  And you don't require a HD that's the same size...  A ghost or image will be quite smaller than your current installation...

I use NOD32 AV and Outpost pro, and Acronis True Image 9 for total backup of HD.
http://www.eset.com/index.php
http://www.agnitum.com/products/outpost/
http://www.acronis.com/
I burn the backup to DVD, you could use a CD but a DVD is better.

Okay, I'll definitely be buying Acronis True Image. Looks good.

I'll be giving the antiviruses a go and see what one I like best.

Thanks alot guys!  

A note on AV programs' "email scanning":

A few years ago I worked front-line tech support for a small ISP.  The biggest problem our users had with receiving email was, you guessed it, the AV scanner locking up.  The way these things work is that it creates a "proxy" on your system that's catching all the inbound mail traffic "in front" of your email program.  Some programs do it explicitly - eg, your email server settings change to something like "127.0.0.1", whereas some (like Norton, possibly current version of McAfee as well) are using a "transparent" proxy - the program is actually inserted a stub of code into Windows' network stack, and is dynamically filtering for appropriate traffic.

However, NONE of them work 100%.  I dealt with this a couple of hundred times easily - it didn't seem to matter which AV program or which version of Windows.

So, my advice would be to forget about the email scanning - as long as your AV program (whichever you choose - 6 of 1, half a dozen of the other) supports dynamic scanning as programs are running (sometimes called "system protection" or similar), even if a malicious program gets downloaded onto your system via email, if it tries to run the AV program should catch it.

I have similar experiences with software firewalls - best avoided.

I know a lot of people will chime in with "it works great for me, no problems here!", well, good for you, but if there is GOING to be a problem with email and/or general Internet connectivity, chances are good it's going to be caused by the AV email scanner or a software firewall.  Save yourselves the potential headache